Thursday, November 10, 2016

The young man at the back of the ballroom in the Santa Monica, Calif., Loews hotel has a question he's been burning to ask, having held it for more than an hour as I delivered a presentation on why content marketing is invaluable for search.

When the time comes for Q&A, he nearly leaps out of his chair before announcing that he's asking a question for pretty much the entire room.

"How do I know what content I should create?" he asks. "I work at a small company. We have a team of content people, but we're typically told what to write without having any idea if it's what people want to read from us."

When asked what the results of their two blog posts per week was, his answer told a tale I hear I often: "No one reads it. We don't know if that's because of the message or because [it's the] wrong audience for the content we're sharing."

In fishing and hunting circles, there's a saying that rings true today, tomorrow, and everyday: "If you want to land trophy animals, you have to hunt in places where trophy animals reside."

Content marketing is not much different.

If you want to ensure that the right audience consumes the content you design, create and share, you have to "hunt" where they are. But to do so successfully, you must first know what they desire in the way of bait (content).

For those of us who've been involved in content marketing for a while now, this all sounds like fairly simplistic, 101-level stuff. But consider this: While we as marketers and technologists have access to sundry tools and platforms that help us discern all sorts of information, most small and mid-size business owners — and the folks who work at small and mid-size businesses — often lack the resources for most of the tools that could help flatten the learning curve for "What content should I create?"

If you spend any time fishing around online, you know very well that the problem isn't going away soon.

For small and mid-size business looking to tackle this challenge, I detail a few tips below that I frequently share during presentations and that seem to work well for clients and prospects alike.

Monday, October 24, 2016

In my day-to-day role at Builtvisible, I build tools to break down marketing challenges and simplify tasks. One of the things we as marketers often need to do is pitch content concepts to sites. To make this easier, you want to pitch something on-topic. To do that more effectively, I decided to spend some time creating a process to help in the ideation stage.

In the spirit of sharing, I thought I'd show you how that process was created and share it with you all.

Tell me what you write

The first challenge is making sure that your content will be on-topic. The starting point, therefore, needs to be creating a title that relates to the site's own recent content. Assuming the site has a blog or recent news area, you can use XPath to help with that.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

One of the challenges in local search engine optimization is
positioning ranks for website not having the local physical mailing address.
Look at the Google SERP results carefully for your local keywords: 6 to 7
Google map listings have acquired the rank in first page out of 10 positions.
The benefit of submitting in Google maps and owning local TLD extension domain
is undeniable.

However, a well optimized website and with high quality
links global websites can rank no: 1 position in Google. So here is the roadmap
to improve the rankings and to compete with local business.

Local Landing Page

Dedicate the landing page by location. For example segregate
html file name by demographic: abc.com/preschool/Bangalore/Karnataka.html

Meta Tag Optimization

If file name is to importance, the title tag is a strong
indicator what the page is about. Use wisely the title tag: Location + product
or product + location: Bangalore Preschools or Preschools in Bangalore.

Overusing the location words falls largely on the keyword
stuffing. The Header tag should strengthen the products and not location. For
example Montessori schools in Bangalore, Reggio Emilia Schools in Bangalore.

Unique Local Content

If you are trying to add hundreds of landing pages to the
websites and replacing the location or physical mailing address you are creating
a panda. Don’t create a website just for the sake of getting local traffic by
duplicating the content. For a month or two you drive traffic but go down
drastically. Create the reviews and user generated content and write unique
content about the city or town.

Local Links

Building local links take more time than usual. Contact
local bloggers to contribute content to your blog and at the same time be a
guest blogger for their blogs. Get links from local business directories and
portal sites. Target the audience in facebook and twitter by demographic.